The kitchen is one of the most hazardous areas in the home for children. A major hazard in kitchens are appliances such as ovens and stoves, which have control knobs which are easily accessible to children. Since children are curious and not typically aware of the dangers of such appliances, they often turn and operate the easily accessible control knobs when not supervised. Operation of the control knobs by a child can cause the child serious burn injuries, start fires, damage the appliance, or ruin food being processed by the appliance.
There are many known devices which attempt to avoid these dangers by preventing child access to the control knobs on the front of appliances. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,836,181 discloses an oven control-knob guard that attaches to the oven and shields the controls and the burners from inadvertent contact by a child or other person. The guard includes a front plate and cooperating side plates. The front plate can be raised and lowered to gain or block access of the control-knobs.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,438,974 also discloses an oven control-knob guard plate that attaches to the oven and shields the controls from inadvertent contact by a child or other person. The guard-plate described therein is outwardly angled to permit access to the control-knobs from above by an adult.
The guard plates described above are designed to be attached to the oven or stove with screw fasteners which makes them somewhat complicated to install and remove. Moreover, the guard plates undesirably reduce the aesthetic appearance of the stove or oven.
Devices which prevent rotation of the control knobs on the front of stoves or ovens are also known. Such a device is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,363,720, which describes a dome-shaped cap that installs over a standard stove control-knob to prevent children from turning or engaging the knob. A pair of spring biased latches on each side of the cap retains the cap to the knob. When the cap is rotated it merely spins relative to the knob thereby preventing rotation of the knob. Squeezing the latches permits the cap to be removed from the knob.
Unfortunately, there may be children who discover how to remove the cap from the control knob, thus defeating it. Moreover, the separately attached spring biased latches add to the manufacturing costs of the device.
Accordingly, there exists a continuing need for an improved guard for appliance control knobs.